Boy Erased

What happens when the story you’re born into no longer fits the person you become? In Boy Erased, Garrard Conley wrestles with that question through the true story of his youth in the American South, where faith, family, and sexuality collided in painful and transformative ways. Raised by Missionary Baptist parents—his father a preacher, his mother the model of Southern devotion—Conley grew up believing that salvation required perfection. But when he was outed as gay in college, that same devotion turned into a campaign to erase who he was. His memoir is a study not only of ex-gay therapy but also of what it means to love and survive within systems that demand your silence.

At its heart, Boy Erased explores the contest between inherited faith and self-discovery. Conley argues that the real sin is not being gay but believing that one must be destroyed to be loved. The book recounts his enrollment in Love in Action (LIA), one of the country’s most notorious ex-gay programs, and reveals how the scars of such conversion efforts reach far beyond the therapy room. Yet the memoir is equally about the emotional terrain of family—the tenderness of a mother who tries to reconcile doctrine with love, and the silence of a father too afraid to face complexity. The tension between literal faith and figurative truth—between the Bible’s absolutes and the ambiguity of human experience—drives the book’s central conflict.

Between God and Self

Conley’s story invites you to examine your own definitions of faith. Can belief survive if it asks you to annihilate part of yourself? Much like the spiritual memoirs of Augustine or Thomas Merton, Conley’s narrative begins with confession but ends with a radical rethinking of grace. Early chapters depict him kneeling in Arkansas churches, echoing the literal-minded verses of his father’s sermons. Each verse promised clarity, but each sermon hid unspoken tensions—between love and judgment, body and soul, parent and child. By adulthood, Conley’s prayers have turned fearful, his relationship with God warped by doctrines that equate purity with heterosexuality. This shift marks one of the central insights of Boy Erased: when faith becomes a tool of conformity, it no longer connects you with the divine but with institutional control.

Love in Action and the Mechanics of Control

When Conley’s parents discover his sexuality, they turn to Love in Action, a real organization that promises to “cure” gay people through repentance and behavioral reconditioning. Inside the program, shame is formalized. Participants attend daily “moral inventories,” chart “sinful genealogies,” and memorize doctrines that collapse addiction, abuse, and desire into one pathology. The staff preaches that through obedience, God will purge sin; defiance means damnation. Conley reveals the psychological violence of these rituals—the stripping away of agency, the forced public confessions, the requirement to script one’s identity as an ongoing failure. The irony, though, is that conformity only deepens doubt. As he submits to each rule, his thoughts become more chaotic; the clearer the institution’s language, the murkier his inner life becomes. That confusion, he realizes, is not a moral weakness but an act of survival.

Here the memoir becomes a modern echo of George Orwell’s 1984 and Foucault’s analyses of discipline. The moral bureaucracy of LIA—its charts, handbooks, and jargon—offers the illusion of order while breeding despair. Conley’s narrative structure mirrors this collapse: sequences of instruction blur into fragments of memory, as if the self is being erased not just spiritually but linguistically. “All else is distraction,” the counselors repeat. But the story, as Conley writes it, insists that distraction—imagination, reading, storytelling—is precisely what saves him. Writing becomes a counter-litany, a way to reclaim the voice that ex-gay logic tried to silence.

Mother, Father, and the Hope of Forgiveness

If Boy Erased were only an exposé of conversion therapy, it would risk despair. Instead, its power lies in the fragile empathy between Conley and his parents. His mother, Martha, is torn between fear and love—pressured by pastors but driven by maternal instinct to rescue her son. Over time she becomes his ally, acknowledging that saving her child means disobeying her church. His father, a preacher who once dreamed of leading thousands to Christ, embodies the South’s tragic conflict: he wants redemption but cannot imagine faith without control. The climax of the memoir—when Conley flees Love in Action and his mother drives him away from its gates—marks not victory but survival. The path to reconciliation remains uncertain, but it opens a space where grace might finally mean acceptance instead of erasure.

Why This Story Matters Today

Conley’s memoir extends far beyond his personal past. Around the world, religious and political movements still frame queerness as curable, a stance that weaponizes scripture against empathy. The book asks: what would happen if we believed that faith could include doubt, or that holiness could coexist with queerness? By narrating his trauma without vilifying every believer, Conley builds a bridge between worlds—a rare acknowledgment that cruelty often comes from love twisted by fear. This nuance elevates Boy Erased from witness testimony to moral philosophy. Ultimately, Conley contends that redemption is not found in repentance for who you are but in recognizing the humanity in those who tried to change you. For anyone who has ever questioned whether love and truth can coexist, Boy Erased offers a hard-won answer: only when honesty replaces shame can either survive.

Conley’s story begins long before conversion therapy—with the landscape of rural Arkansas, where religion was as common as humidity. He was raised within the Missionary Baptist tradition, a branch of evangelical Christianity that took scripture literally and viewed neutrality as moral failure. His father’s dealership doubled as mission field; Bible study preceded car sales. “No cussing tolerated—this is the Lord’s business,” a sign read above the showroom couch. To grow up here was to inherit certainty: Jesus would return soon, the Rapture was imminent, and ambiguity endangered the soul.

Living Under the Armor of God

From childhood, Garrard was trained to see the world through spiritual warfare. His father, shaped by injury and near-death, believed faith required vigilance, a perpetual readiness for apocalypse. Cars, weather, and news headlines all served as signs of End Times. These habits of fear bound the family together but also suffocated difference. Every choice—from hymns sung to colors worn—became a moral test. For young Garrard, introverted and artistic, such vigilance bred guilt. The more he tried to perform normal Southern masculinity, the stranger he felt inside his own body.

Work, Guilt, and Masculine Proof

At his father’s dealership, manual labor functioned as both punishment and proof of manhood. Summers spent scrubbing hubcaps and power-washing cars were designed to make him sturdy, heterosexual, “normal.” Yet touch—the sunburn, the ache of effort—only heightened his awareness of difference. When his father asked how many customers he’d witnessed to, Garrard joked that the pressure washer lacked a soul. Behind humor hid exhaustion and shame. In evangelical culture, work sanctifies, and silence about desire maintains purity. Conley learns early that masculinity means suppression.

A Theology of Fear and Control

The Missionary Baptist creed left no room for gray areas: there was Heaven or Hell, truth or deception, salvation or damnation. This all-or-nothing worldview, borrowed from revivalist traditions and Billy Graham politics, shaped not only theology but family love. His father’s kindness—buying strangers lunch to “save souls”—masked a deeper authoritarianism. Like God himself, his authority was absolute, his intentions pure, his consequences terrifying. When Garrard failed to deliver a convincing Bible lesson, the disappointment was not paternal but cosmic: to falter was to fail God. The family’s daily rituals of scripture reading and grace disguised a constant pressure to conform. Within this house of literal faith, doubt became the most unforgivable sin.

(Note: Similar tensions appear in Tara Westover’s Educated, where parental piety turns education into rebellion. Conley’s difference is that even education—college, literature—shares the divine rhetoric of transformation, making escape more ambiguous.)

Faith as Inheritance, Faith as Cage

By the time Conley reaches adolescence, belief has fused with identity. Faith provides belonging but also surveillance; every act is seen by both God and community. His father’s scars—literal burns from an old accident—transform into symbols of divine purpose, reminders that suffering yields sanctity. For the son, they become warnings: salvation costs pain. “You don’t need shelter when you wear the Armor of God,” his father says. The phrase is meant for protection but heard as threat. This is the paradox that opens Boy Erased: the same armor that shields you from evil can also trap you inside it.

Teenage Garrard learns quickly that the body is both shrine and snare. Within the Baptist church, sexuality exists only in whispers—confessed in euphemism, punished in public. When he begins dating Chloe, a kind church girl, their innocent intimacy becomes a battlefield of dread. Love is permitted only as rehearsal for marriage; any pleasure beyond that boundary invites eternal fire. Garrard’s growing awareness of attraction to men thus clashes not only with society but with his own flesh.

The Closet as Survival Strategy

Conley describes hiding behind straight relationships as both safety net and self-harm. His connection with Chloe protects him from suspicion—“the congregation expects us to marry”—but turns affection into performance. The pressure to behave correctly converts every touch into anxiety. When she reaches for his leg and he jerks away, both interpret it spiritually rather than psychologically: restraint equals virtue. What neither grasps yet is how faith’s virtue ethic turns repression into pathology. His fear of sin becomes indistinguishable from his fear of intimacy.

Forbidden Desire and First Betrayal

College brings brief freedom and eventual disaster. Away from home, Garrard meets David, an outwardly charming peer who will later rape him and then out him to his parents. The assault shatters his sense of control and reinforces the narrative he’s been taught: that queerness leads to ruin. When his father demands repentance, the trauma is misread as sin itself. In evangelical logic, victimhood and culpability collapse; suffering becomes evidence of moral disorder. That conflation of harm and guilt becomes the core wound that will drive him into ex-gay therapy.

Addiction to Purity

Raised on sermons equating lust with addiction, Conley internalizes recovery language long before rehab. The church, like a 12-step group, promises freedom through confession—but the confession never ends. Each prayer fuels future temptation. When his mother vomits from the shock of his coming-out, her body acts out what he already feels: the need to purge the self. In Love in Action, this cycle will become official doctrine. Participants are told to log every impure thought, to equate desire with disease. For readers, these scenes expose how purity culture mimics addiction not in theory but in practice: the harder you strive to abstain, the more defined by craving you become.

By portraying his sexuality as silence, Conley shows why repression breeds violence—not just between people but within them. What cannot be spoken festers, and the result is self-destruction disguised as holiness.

The chapters set in Love in Action form the memoir’s most haunting section. Garrard checks into a suburban strip-mall facility with its slogan of healing plastered above the door. Before long, freedom contracts to a set of fluorescent-lit rooms. The counselors replace pastors but wield the same theology of control. Their goal is to discipline sexuality, not to understand it.

The World of Rules and Rituals

LIA operates like both church and bureaucracy. Participants surrender phones, journals, and clothes deemed too “gay.” Each morning begins with “Quiet Time,” followed by Scripture drills and “moral inventories.” Men must shave daily; women must wear bras even while sleeping. The manual spans 274 pages—a parody of the Bible’s letters and laws. Garrard’s first act upon entry is to have his writing confiscated, his creative self labeled a “False Image.” This deletion is not incidental: to heal, he must stop narrating his own story. The institution’s genius lies in equating silence with faith.

Sin as Bureaucratic Inventory

Smid, the director, exudes corporate charisma—khakis, wire-rimmed glasses, and slogans about “God-shaped voids.” Therapy takes the shape of lists: addiction checklists, family-genogram trees mapping generational sin (A for alcoholism, H for homosexuality, M for mental illness). Each cause leads to the same effect: homosexuality as hereditary curse. Participants end by declaring, “I have been medicating pain through sex.” The logic collapses identity into symptom. Under this system, even empathy becomes dangerous; touching another participant risks “stumbling.”

Psychological and Spiritual Violence

Conley’s tone is subdued, almost clinical, which makes the cruelty sharper. Teenagers are forced to dramatize abuse on stage, to scream at empty chairs labeled “Father,” to confess invented sins. Tears signal progress; dissent invites punishment. One girl caught self-harming is told to pray harder. One man’s suicide attempts are reframed as evidence of insufficient faith. The horror here is banality—torture by paperwork and prayer. The line between healing and harm dissolves entirely. Conley’s psychology training allows him to reveal that what looks like therapy often functions as indoctrination through learned helplessness.

Writing as Rebellion

Deprived of his Moleskine, Conley begins composing stories in memory. Language becomes resistance: recounting inner monologues during lectures, preserving forbidden metaphors. Eventually, his imagination—and his mother’s courage—becomes his escape route. When his mother witnesses the program’s extremism, she reclaims her agency, literally driving him out of LIA. In that drive lies the book’s inversion of Abraham’s test: this time, the parent refuses to sacrifice the child.

(Note: Compared to memoirs like Ryan Berg’s No House to Call My Home, Conley’s focus on language as rebellion shows how storytelling can rebuild identity even after institutions erase it.)

Throughout Boy Erased, Conley’s parents embody two poles of Southern religious love. His mother negotiates between compassion and doctrine; his father guards faith through authority. Their conflicting reactions to his coming-out drive much of the memoir’s emotional arc. Yet neither parent is reduced to villain or saint. Conley’s great strength is generosity—he portrays them as captives of belief rather than simple perpetrators.

A Mother’s Awakening

Martha Conley begins as dutiful believer, consulting pastors for a cure. Her first instinct is action: find therapy, preserve her son’s soul. But in Memphis hotel rooms while Garrard endures treatment days, doubt creeps in. She starts questioning the words printed in LIA’s brochures. By the book’s end, when she tells him “We’re stopping this now,” she performs her own conversion—from rule-following to unconditional love. Years later, interviews reveal she joined PFLAG and advocates for equality. Her arc reframes salvation not as separation from sin but as unity with her child.

A Father’s Silence

His father’s script is tragically different. A former athlete turned preacher, he patterns his life on authority figures like Billy Graham. His burns from a past accident literalize martyrdom: pain sanctifies purpose. He can rebuild engines and men but fears what he cannot fix. Conley observes that for his father, love and leadership are indistinguishable; to release control would mean failure. When Garrard returns from LIA, the two barely speak. Yet the book closes not in condemnation but in fragile hope—father saying quietly, “I want you to be happy.” Love survives, if only as muted echo.

Faith Reimagined

Underneath these portraits lies the author’s theological question: can love exist without domination? Conley’s answer emerges through contrast. His mother’s empathy restores what doctrine broke; his father’s rigidity exposes faith’s fragility. Together they reveal that unconditional love is sacrilege in systems built on condition. When parents choose love over rules, they rewrite scripture in real time. Conley frames this not as losing faith but returning to its source—the Gospel’s forgotten ethic of mercy. True grace, he suggests, requires doubt.

The final lesson of Boy Erased is that storytelling itself becomes salvation. Having survived ex-gay therapy, Conley turns to writing not just to remember but to resist erasure. His craft, honed in graduate workshops, transforms trauma into coherence. The act of narrating what once silenced him allows him to reclaim agency from institutions, theology, and even memory’s distortions.

From Confession to Creation

In conversion therapy, confession was coerced: a ritual of shame performed aloud. In memoir, confession becomes choice. Where Smid demanded Garrard speak only of sin, the author now uses language to explore complexity. He rewrites the “moral inventory” into literature. This shift echoes philosopher Michel Foucault’s claim that power and language are intertwined—the one who names controls reality. By narrating his own past, Conley subverts the system that once defined him as deviant.

Memory, Reconstruction, and Mercy

In his author’s note, Conley admits the difficulty of writing from trauma: no journals, no photos, only recollection and conversation with his mother. The memoir thus becomes collaboration and act of forgiveness. Revisiting scenes from differing perspectives—his and hers—illuminates how memory itself can heal. He doesn’t aim for revenge but understanding. The book closes years later with him listening to his father’s tentative blessing, aware that healing is incomplete yet ongoing. The writer’s empathy, once censored as sin, becomes his holiest skill.

Witness and Wider Impact

By publishing Boy Erased, Conley contributes to collective testimony alongside authors like Emily Danforth (The Miseducation of Cameron Post) and survivors worldwide. The memoir’s adaptation into film brought these hidden stories to mainstream audiences, reclaiming narratives that religious politics had buried. For readers, it offers not a creed but a practice: speak what must not be spoken; turn confession into art; replace fear with witness. In doing so, Conley shows that truth-telling—once labeled rebellion—can itself be a form of grace.